Wednesday, December 15, 2010

thepointless.com: beginning facebook integration

I've been taking time recently to work on thepointless.com. Frankly, it generates significantly more traffic than Svidgen currently does, and I'd like both reward and harvest those visitors, rather than let the flow of people slowly die off as I have in the past.

On a content level, I've removed a lot of fluff and pushed article-type content out to the angry stickman blog. The site has been trimmed down to a few outbound links and two activities: the clickometer and the dots. Both of these have generated a good deal of traffic in the past and have been featured on other sites, including some youtube videos.

I've also started some facebook integration. So far, this has involved three things:

(re)Creating a facebook page
This was pretty easy to do. The site is pointless, so the facebook page could be equally pointless. The primary obstacle, which is still an issue, is getting facebook to properly auto-update notes based on the RSS feed of the angry stickman blog.

In general though, I find this to have been a good investment. The page allows me to instantly remind previous "likers" that the site is still there, and it's still awesomely pointless. Furthermore, because it's social, interactions with the facebook page serve as a free advertisement directly in friends' news feeds.

Adding a Like button to the site
This was pretty easy to do. It's set to share the count with the corresponding facebook page. It's easy for someone to click if they like what they see. And that subscribes them to future status updates from the site. Good stuff.

and Basic "score" publishing
The clickometer and dots provide "scores" after the initial interaction. Using the simple JavaScript FB API, these scores can be easily published to a user's FB news feed. And a few folks publish their scores every day, which occasionally leads to an increase in traffic, and more importantly, a really awesome news feed item.

From a marketing perspective, the ROI for reworking the site and starting some basic FB integration has already been great. I'm seeing traffic slowly increase. And I've seeing pages/visit increase drastically. People are engaging more with the site and publishing their interactions, which is turn is drawing more attention.

Since this blog is intended primarily for geeks, I'd be willing to write a little about any of the specifics of the "integration." But, I'm not going to rush on that unless someone voices their interest. The main points are these:

thepointless.com has been remade and has my active attention.

facebook integration, even on a basic level, is really beneficial.

In any case, keep your eye on thepointless.com for more updates. I'm thinking of recreating the monkey war next, with facebook integration -- but who knows? It's thepointless.com after all, anything could [or couldn't] happen ...